The Problem with Pondoks and terror in Southern Thailand

There is a potent mix of Islamic extremism, cultural isolation, political instability and crime in Thailand’s Southern provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala that have led to over 6,000 murders and double as many injuries from various terrorist acts over the last 11 years.

Many have pointed the finger at radicalization in the Islamic schools (pondoks) as part of the problem because of the increasing influence of the intolerant Wahhabi sect that funds these institutions.

‘The war in southern Thailand is long-running and threatens to spread.’ “On May 16 this year, a bomber walked unnoticed into a toy store in the main street of Yala, a town in southern Thailand only a few hours’ drive from the country’s main tourist beaches, and left a shopping bag packed with explosives. Minutes later, a mobile telephone in the bag detonated the bomb that ripped through the store, one of three dozen blasts over three days in May that injured 22 people and terrified the town’s population of 65,000…More than 180 teachers have been killed (and government schools burned down) mostly because they are seen as a symbol of Thai rule…Don Pathan, the independent consultant who lives in Yala town and has been following the conflict for 20 years, says he has been told a council of about a dozen Muslim clerics presides over the insurgency.The clandestine cell structure appears to be deliberately set up in such a way that members may not be personally acquainted with others under the overall command and operate on a need-to-know basis. The insurgents have no political wing, leaving them with no forum to publicly air their goals… Militants have recruited children as young as 14, according to Child Soldiers International….Eighty-three year-old Buddhist Klean Sangam-pai says for decades Buddhists and Muslims lived happily side by side in her village in Pattani. But in 2004 militants shot her son dead and three years later beheaded her husband and torched his body and their family house.”

It is no coincidence that the rising lawlessness and violence along the Malaysian border are committed by radicalized Malay speaking Muslims who form the majority of the population and seek independence from Thai laws and authority. As the majority of the populations in these provinces are Muslim, terror does not take the form of indiscriminate bombings and attacks against civilian targets but rather against government institutions such as police, army and schools and also targeted assassinations of Non-Muslims by black clad terrorists. The violent Southern Malay speaking (Pattani Malay/Jawi) Muslims of Thailand (44% of the total Muslim population of 7 million out of a total Thai population of 65 million) are to be contrasted with the Northern Thai Muslims (56%) who are Thai speaking, moderate and integrated into Thai society.

The worry for the Thai authorities is that the Southern insurgents are now getting training and support from the global Wahhabi Salafi petro dollar ‘Islamic awakening’ terrorists through their SE Asian affiliates such as JI in Indonesia. This often plays out in Southern extremists demanding that education in schools be Islamic, in Arabic or Malay and resist Thai language as culturally anti-Islam. One of the modern drivers of the violent conflict is that thousands of Thai Muslim students (follow the example of their cult hero Haji Sulong who was indoctrinated in Mecca) go overseas to study in radical Sunni educational facilities in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Cairo and Indonesia and so get ‘infected’/indoctrinated by the Wahhabi puritanical and intolerant strain of Islam. They return as radical hate preacher imams (ustas/ustaz/Tok Gurus) such as Mahamu Mama aka Pador Mamu to set up radical mosques and Islamist schools (pondoks). Incredibly 80% of all students in these three Southern Thailand provinces attend a religious school (pondok) guaranteeing instability in the region for generations to come.

According to this news site, a threatening letter sent to a Buddhist teacher in southern Thailand. The translation reads:

“Kru Bow Kru Koy Kru Kai [the name of the teacher], the Thai Buddhist get out. Don’t work here. Not guarantee for safety. Go to teach at Krongpinang at Nibongchanoopatum. We know and can follow where you are, what you teach, and how you go. We, Pattani state, do not want Thai Buddhists teachers. This is the first warning. You are also the Thai Buddhist [Kafir Siam]. We are Allah people and don’t get involved with them. Get out. Allah protects people who believe in Allah only.”

It is therefore not unusual to see monks protected by Thai military in these Southern Thai provinces.

It is little surprise that when Muslim students return to their Southern Thai mosques from Wahhabi funded institutions abroad that the rate of bombings, kidnappings, beheadings and shootings have dramatically increased. Just last month another wave of terrorist bomb attacks took place in Yala Province believed to be the work of Hikmat Allah Abadan (Brotherhood of the Eternal Judgment of God).

Mass Wahhabi Salafi radicalization of intellectual elites drives terror in this troubled region channelling regional political discontent into a broader clash of civilization paradigm of the global jihadists.

One center of such destabilization is the religious educational facility called theYala Islamic College founded in 1998. It is funded by International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), a Saudi based organization that espouses the intolerant Wahhabi ideology. This facility churns out hate preachers that then go and brainwash Muslim youth in the pondoks into the radical Wahhabi Salafi sect of Islam.

“Since 2001 the civil society in the three southern Thai provinces has experienced a widespread imposition of legalistic Salafi norms and the reality on the ground is today very different from what it was in former southern Thailand.Salafism has heavily eroded Patani cultural identity and current insurgent groups have extreme religious goals, such as an Islamic Caliphate. On 26 July 2009 Abu Yasir Fikri, President of PULO, and the “emir” of the Group of Mujahidin Islam Patani (GMIP), Me Kuteh, agreed to join forces. Abu Yasir Fikri was allowed to speak on behalf of the GMIP on all political issues. The agreement included a section in which they agreed to form a unified military force, the Patani Liberation Army (PLA). The PLA would be commanded by the First Deputy Military Commander of the Patani United Liberation Organisation (PULO). On 18 April 2009, PULO outlined a solution to conflict at the OICsTwelfth Meeting of the Intergovernmental Group of Experts to consider the Conditions of Muslim Communities and Minorities in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.” (Note OIC: Organization of the Islamic Conference changed its name to Organization of Islamic Cooperation in 2011). Taken from South Thailand Insurgency

Terrorists use pondoks such as Yuwa Muslim School in Pattani province as centres of radicalization and support. In January 2015 Thai military had to shoot three terrorists using that facility.

Puritanical hate text books funded by Wahhabis now proliferate among the Southern Thai Muslims. One example is the notorious ‘Berjihad di Pattani’.The text was based on writings of Sayyid Qutb Maulana Abul al Maududi and the al-Farida al Gha’iba by Muhammad Farraj (the text that inspired the Jihadist murderers of President Sadat of Egypt in 1981).It is published in Kelentan, Malaysia and uses selective texts from the Quran to extol violent jihad against all non-Sunni people. The book directs true Muslims to even kill their parents if they do not fight in the way of Allah by opposing the Thai authorities, Buddhist monks and Thai educational facilities and teachers and as jihadi warriors joining the religious war against non-Muslim people.

The majority of moderate Muslims in Thailand’s North are resisting this perto-dollar extremist Wahhabi takeover of Islam in the South. They publish counter narratives to try and inoculate Muslim youth from Wahhabi/Salafi radicalization. The anti-radical text ‘Facts about the Distortion of Islamic Teachings as Appeared in The Struggle for Pattini’, is an example of this heroic effort.

What is happening in Southern Thailand is but a part of a global problem associated with the spread of an intolerant and puritanical strain of Islam, the Wahhabi/Salafi. Whilst the Wahhabi schools do not teach bomb making 101, they certainly espouse an ideology of bomb thinking.

” Contemporary Islam is witnessing a crisis of authority both in religious and sociopolitical arenas. This is being caried out by the clashing of the puritans (comprising fundamentalists, militants, extremists, radicals, fanatics and jihadists) and the moderate (consisting of modernists, progressives, and reformers) sections of the Muslim community all over the world.

The modern phenomenon of Islamic resurgence seeks to bring back Islamic values, practices, institutions and law back into the lives of Muslims. It seeks tp re-create an Islamic ethos, an Islamic social order, at the vortex of which is the human being guided by the Quran and the Sunnah. This phenomenon is reflected in an increase in the use of Arabic religious terminology, wearing of Arabicized attire by males, donning of the hijab by women, segregation between the sexes and a decrease in interreligious communication combined with an urgent urge to establish an Islamic state in the case of Muslim majorities and an Islamic society in the case of Muslim minorities….

Historically, Islam in Thailand has been of the syncretistic type (Kuam Tua (Malay)/Khana kau (Thai) which involved the intermingling of local practices with normative Islam. It had been tolerant…but this has changed gradually (into) Salafi-Wahhabi oriented Islam (Kuam Muda (Malay)/ Khana mai (Thai). (The Wahhabi influence started) in 1926 with the arrival to Bangkok of Ahmad Wahab (an Indonesian who studied Wahhabism in Mecca but who was exiled by the Dutch from returning to Indonesia). (This hard line strain merged in the 1960’s with the growing Salafist movements such as ) Young Muslim Association of Thailand….In the 1970’s, the spread of the Saudi petro-dollar sponsored program of Islamic resurgence led to the emergence of the Thai Salafi reformism with Saudi Wahhabism resulting in the gradual marginalization of the khana kau section of the Muslim community. ..The first instance of Salafi-Wahhabi reformist ideas coming to Southern Thailand was with Haji Sulong who was a Malay Msulim…educated in Mecca…Islamic resurgence has been a continuing phenomenon within the Malay speaking Muslims of Southern Thailand until today…with the aim of establishing a pure Islamic society through religious activism and proselytism. Wahhabi reformers such as Dr. Ismail Lufti and his Yala Islamic College (who eschews any nomenclature of ‘Wahhabi’ and prefers to call his movement ‘ahl as-Sunnah’), which is sponsored by Saudi benefactors, have engaged in undertaking the puritan reformation….(characterized by) :

• rigid literalism

• intolerance

• supremacist psychology

• restriction of women

• opposition to rational thought

• hostility to artistic expression

“The Wahhabism (holds) the old ethnocentric belief that only Arabs can represent the one and true authentic Islam…that Bedouin culture (was) the one and only true Islam… (at it’s inception in the Eighteenth century it was a device to reject Turkish dominance)…the Wahhabi’s of today take the culture of Saudi Arabia and universalize it into the singularly true Islam.” Khaled Abou El Fadl, The Great Theft Wrestling Islam from the Extremists’, pp 52-53

“The Islamization of the southern conflict occurred in the 1980’s through the external influence of Islamic movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, Jamaat-e-Islami of Pakistan and the impacts of Global Muslim related events such as the wars in Bosnia, Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq. …the majority of Southern Thai Muslims identify themselves with the Shafii school of ISlamic law and shun Wahhabism…the arrival of Wahhabi Islam in southern Thailand resulted in rifts within local Islam which even caused theological splits within families…the traditional Malay Muslims are resisting puritanical Wahhabi, viewing it as a threat to their culture…(nevertheless the coming of the Wahhabi extremism has contributed to increasing radicalization in religion and politics).”

Alexander Athos is a writer and businessman.He was awarded a Bachelor of Arts (European History)
Personal background
Alexander was christened Orthodox brought up Catholic and now Evangelical Christian with an acceptance of the best in Christian tradition and a respect for genuine people of faith from other cultures.
Political inclinations: Christian intellectual who has an eclectic predisposition to understanding global and national political and social trends and seeking to influence them for good by thoughtful and persuasive discourse.

Western strategic mistake in the Middle East

The widespread terrorist acts and catastrophic events of 2016 in Europe have revealed new approaches to extremist and radical groups to create fears among Westerners.

The investigation of the destructive actions of two past years has shown that such terrorist operations were based on networked and coordinated approaches. That is, the terrorist cells carried out their destructive actions based on a timetable group plan. In such circumstances, it is possible to observe such behaviors, given the familiarity of security guards and intelligence agencies in Europe, but it is difficult to change the approaches to monitoring such actions in the two past year. Instead of taking collective action, terrorists use the means of mass destructive actions in their new ways. In such a situation, a person kills public places instead of communicating with the supporters or members of terrorist currents such as ISIL with the aim of shedding people’s blood. Events like the French Nazi Crusade, or the accumulation of people in Germany, have been blamed for such an approach. Naturally, the use of such methods and the use of public transport vehicles, or even sticks and gadgets, has provided security and intelligence agencies with a great deal of difficulty in detecting criminal agents.

Evidence suggests that in the new approaches of the ISIL, they are seeking to use any means to achieve their goals, and it is natural that in these circumstances the concept of security in Europe has a change undergone. From another perspective, the use of such practices shows that the Isis are seeking to use any means to demonstrate their power and, along with this issue, to supporters and groups that want to recruit and join terrorist groups. They order that they do not necessarily have to endure the journey to accompany them, but that pro-active agents can arrange their subversive moves at the same location. The facts indicate that the only wolves used for ISIS terrorist groups are the instigation of this issue to Westerners, which, despite the efforts of some countries to eliminate ISIS’s fears, and fears of Europeans from recurring events the terrorists will not end.

ISILs are always trying to organize people from the corners of the world for terrorist acts; those who are known for wolves only because of the nature of isolation and psychological frustration. That is why, with many beliefs, this group is now considered to be the most dangerous terrorist organization. In the current situation, although the possibility of reversing and defeating ISIL in the region and eliminating the danger of the formation of the Islamic Emirate of Iraq and the Shamal seems probable, it is important to understand that different groups, including ISIS and other organized terrorist groups, are based on ideological. It seems that in such a case, the disintegration of the organization will not eliminate ISIL’s thoughts, but those who have such intellectual foundations will underground forms of state-controlled current state of affairs. Continue their terrorist operations.

While the West’s false policy on dual use of terrorism against the developments in the region, especially in Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Libya, is a major contributor to terrorism, the immigration of citizens from different countries, including Europe to Syria and the return of Western terrorists to Europe. Today, more than any other country in Europe is the target of ISIS attacks in Europe, which in the developments in Syria, we saw that the country adopted the strongest positions in support of irresponsible armed groups and some terrorist groups.

We are now witnessing an unholy unity among apparently secular currents claiming liberty with radical Fascist currents and their consensus over the limitation of Islamic groups and the suppression of Muslims. In fact, now, the West is not only captured by ISIS terrorist incidents, but is also threatened by extremist rightwing people who have received a high vote in some elections because of Islamophobia. The same groups that have tackled the asylum seekers have been slogans for victorious dynasties.

On the one hand, non-Muslims who carry out acts of terrorism on the basis of personal or even religious beliefs carry out terrorist acts, the westerners regard the disciples, but at the same time, any Muslim who subjugates propaganda acts based on non-Islamic and non-religious ideas of the Islamic State is a circle Muslims consider his actions taken from Quranic teachings.

Along with this, it should be noted that the West is fully aware of Saudi Arabia’s role in current supporting terrorist. The evidence clearly shows the country’s financial and spiritual backing of the jihadist Salafi in 2001 and Takfiri Salafi since 2011, and the US Senate’s 28-page report contends. However, an attempt by Western countries to pressure Saudi Arabia or change it’s political, military, and economic relations with the country does not take place.

At the beginning of the formation of ISIS, the West had the hope that with the issuance of radical Islamists to Syria and Iraq and the emergence of conflicts among Islamic countries, the Takfiris’ duty would be completely determined, and the countries of the region would be involved in tribal conflicts. The formation of such a subjectivity in the West, of course, was due to the fact that the insecurity of the region would provide a platform for Islamism and their more active presence in the Middle East and West Asia, but we saw that prostitutes of the chickens return to the nest in Europe, and that the boomerang ISIS sat back in the heart of Europe.

Of course, not all terrorist attacks in Europe can be attributed to the organization of ISIS, and it seems that the basic premise of terrorists is based mainly on the basis of their thinking and reasons, such as family and mental problems, on subversive acts. ISIS, however, uses all its media capabilities to take advantage of these actions, and it has tried to magnify its operational capability by assigning individuals who have sometimes died as a result of terrorist acts and suicide attacks.

On the other hand, terrorism should be viewed as a global issue, and at the same time it should be emphasized that foreign policy of some countries and their interference in the affairs of other countries is one of the factors of the emergence and spread of terrorism. These countries must rethink their policies in order to provide a ground for the elimination of terrorism.

Related

UN launches new framework to strengthen fight against terrorism

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres launched a new Organization-wide framework on Thursday to coordinate efforts across the peace and security, humanitarian, human rights and sustainable development sectors.

Termed the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Coordination Compact, the framework is an agreement between the UN chief, 36 Organizational entities, the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) and the World Customs Organization, to better serve the needs of Member States when it comes to tackling the scourge of international terrorism.

Speaking at the first meeting of the Compact’s Coordination Committee, at the UN Headquarters, in New York, Mr. Guterres highlighted the need to ensure full respect for international human rights standards and rule of law in countering terrorism.

“Policies that limit human rights only end up alienating the very communities they aim to protect and which normally have every interest in fighting extremism,” he said, adding that as a result “such policies can effectively drive people into the hands of terrorists and undermine our efforts on prevention.”

He also urged greater vigilance against the misuse of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, drones and 3D (three-dimensional) printing, as well as against the use of hate-speech and distortion of religious beliefs by extremist and terrorist groups.

According to the UN Office of Counter-Terrorism, the Coordination Committee will oversee the implementation of the Compact and monitor its implementation. It is chaired by UN Under-Secretary-General for counter-terrorism, Vladimir Voronkov.

It also looked into the organization of work and ways to improve the delivery of an “All-of-UN” capacity-building support to Member States.

The UN Global Counter-Terrorism Coordination Compact Task Force will replace the Counter-Terrorism Implementation Task Force, which was established in 2005 to strengthen UN system-wide coordination and coherence of counter-terrorism efforts.

Related

ISIL’s ‘legacy of terror’ in Iraq: UN verifies over 200 mass graves

Investigators have uncovered more than 200 mass graves containing thousands of bodies in areas of Iraq formerly controlled by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/Da’esh), according to a United Nations human rights report out on Tuesday.

In the joint report, Unearthing Atrocities, the UN entities said the evidence gathered from the sites “will be central to ensuring credible investigations, prosecutions and convictions” in accordance with international due process standards.

Ján Kubiš, the top UN official in Iraq and the head of UNAMI, said that the mass grave sites “are a testament to harrowing human loss, profound suffering and shocking cruelty.”

“Determining the circumstances surrounding the significant loss of life will be an important step in the mourning process for families and their journey to secure their rights to truth and justice,” he added.

Between June 2014 and December 2017, ISIL seized large areas of Iraq, leading a campaign of widespread and systematic violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, “acts that may amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and possible genocide,” the report states.

Traumatized families have the ‘right to know’

The UNAMI-OHCHR report also documents the “significant challenges” families of the missing face in trying to find the fate of their loved ones.

At present, they must report to more than five separate authorities, a process that is both time-consuming and frustrating for traumatized families.

Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, underscored that the families “have the right to know.”

“ISIL’s horrific crimes in Iraq have left the headlines but the trauma of the victims’ families endures, with thousands of women, men and children still unaccounted for,” she said.

“Their families have the right to know what happened to their loved ones. Truth, justice and reparations are critical to ensuring a full reckoning for the atrocities committed by ISIL.”

The report documents 202 mass grave sites across Iraq, amid fears that there could be more. Source: UNAMI-OHCHR report

Victim-centred approach needed

Among its recommendations, the report calls for a victim-centred approach and a transitional justice process that is established in consultation with, and accepted by, Iraqis, particularly those from affected communities.

It also urges a multidisciplinary approach to the recovery operations, with the participation of experienced specialists, including weapons contamination and explosives experts and crime scene investigators.

Alongside, it also calls on the international community to provide resources and technical support to efforts related to the exhumation, collection, transportation, storage and return of human remains to families, as well as their identification, particularly by helping strengthen the national Mass Graves Directorate.